While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he easily calls “the best paper ever.” in class”. It explores the ethics of the burqa ban with clear passages, suitable examples, and coherent arguments.
A red flag was immediately raised.
Mr. Aumann questioned his student about whether he wrote the essay himself. Student confessed to use ChatGPTa chatbot that provides information, explains concepts, and generates ideas in simple sentences — and in this case, wrote articles.
Alarmed by his findings, Mr. Aumann decided to switch up the essay writing style for his courses this semester. He plans to have students write their first draft in class, using browsers that monitor and limit computer activity. In future drafts, students must explain each revision. Mr. Aumann, who may skip the essays in the coming semesters, also plans to include ChatGPT in lessons by asking students to rate the chatbot’s response.
“What’s going on in class is no longer, ‘Here’s some question – let’s talk about it between us humans,'” he said, but instead, “it’s more like, ‘People What does this alien machine think too?’”
Across the country, university professors like Mr. Aumann, deans and administrators are beginning to overhaul classrooms to meet ChatGPT, driving a potentially huge change in teaching and learning. Some professors are completely redesigning their courses, making changes including more oral exams, group work, and handwritten assessments instead of typing.
These moves are part of a real-time struggle with a new wave of technology known as creative artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, released in November by artificial intelligence lab OpenAI, is at the forefront of the change. The chatbot generates clear and oddly nuanced text in response to short prompts, with people using it to write love letters, poems, fan fiction — and their school work.
That has affected some middle and high schools, with teachers and administrators trying to discern whether students are using chatbots to do schoolwork. Some public school systems, including in New York City and Seattle, have since banned the tool on school Wi-Fi devices and networks to prevent cheating, although students can easily find a workaround to access ChatGPT.
In higher education, colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban AI tools because regulators doubt the move will work and they don’t want to infringe on academic freedom. That means the way people teach is changing.
“We try to establish general policies that definitely support the faculty’s right to run a class,” said Joe Glover, president of the University of Florida, rather than targeting cheating methods. specific. “This won’t be the last innovation we have to tackle.”
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That’s especially true when AI created in the early days. OpenAI is expected to release another tool soon, GPT-4, which makes text generation better than previous versions. Google built LaMDAa rival chatbot and Microsoft is discussing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI. Start-ups in Silicon Valleyincluding Stable AI and Character.AIare also working on general AI tools.
An OpenAI spokesperson said the lab has realized its programs can be used to fool people and is developing technology to help people identify text generated by ChatGPT.
At many universities, ChatGPT is now at the top of the agenda. Administrators are forming task groups and holding university-wide discussions for feedback on the tool, with much of the guidance being adapted to the technology.
At schools including George Washington University in Washington, DC, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ, and Appalachian State University in Boone, NC, professors are phasing out take-home assignments, open books – already became a mainstream assessment method during the pandemic but now appears to be vulnerable to chatbots. Instead, they chose to do class assignments, handwriting, group work, and oral exams.
Gone are the prompts like “write five pages about this or that.” Instead, some professors are asking questions that they hope will be too clever for chatbots and asking students to write about their own lives and current events.
Sid Dobrin, dean of the English department at the University of Florida, said students are “plagiarizing because assignments can be plagiarized”.
Frederick Luis Aldama, chair of the humanities department at the University of Texas at Austin, said he intends to teach newer or more pertinent texts that ChatGPT might have less information on, such as early sonnets of William Shakespeare instead of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”.
Chatbots can push “people who rely on basic, normative texts to really reach out of their comfort zone into things that are not online,” he said.
In the event that the changes fail to prevent plagiarism, Aldama and other professors say they plan to put in place stricter standards for what they expect from students and how they are graded. Now an essay with only thesis, introduction, supporting paragraphs and conclusion is not enough.
“We need to continue our game,” Aldama said. “Imagination, creativity, and analytical innovation that we normally consider a Grade A article needs to be included in a Grade B paper.”
Universities are also working towards educating students about new AI tools. The University of Buffalo in New York and Furman University in Greenville, SC, said they planned to include discussion of AI tools in required courses that teach incoming or freshman students about the topics. concepts such as academic integrity.
“We had to add a scenario about this so students could see a concrete example,” said Kelly Ahuna, who directs the office of academic integrity at the University of Buffalo. “We want to prevent things from happening instead of catching them when they happen.”
Other universities are trying to draw the line for AI at Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Vermont at Burlington are drafting revisions to their academic integrity policy so that their definitions of plagiarism include generic AI.
John Dyer, vice president for admissions services and educational technology at Dallas Theological Seminary, said the language in his seminary’s code of honor nonetheless feels “a bit old-fashioned.” He intends to update the definition of plagiarism to include: “using text written by a generation system as one’s own (e.g., entering a prompt into an artificial intelligence engine and using the output in article).”
The abuse of AI tools is unlikely to end, so some professors and universities say they plan to use detectors to root out that activity. Turnitin’s Plagiarism Detection Service speak it will incorporate more features for identifying AI, including ChatGPT, this year.
Edward Tian, its creator and a senior at Princeton University, says more than 6,000 teachers from Harvard University, Yale University, the University of Rhode Island and others have also signed up to use GPTZero , a program that promises to quickly detect AI-generated text. .
Some students see the value of using AI tools for learning. Lizzie Shackney, 27, a law and design student at the University of Pennsylvania, started using ChatGPT to brainstorm papers and debug groups of coding problems.
“There are subjects that want you to share and don’t want you to spin your wheel,” she says, describing her computer science and statistics classes. “Where my brain is useful is understanding the meaning of the code.”
But she is apprehensive. ChatGPT, Ms. Shackney said, sometimes misinterprets ideas and cites the wrong source. The University of Pennsylvania hasn’t made any regulations on the tool either, so she doesn’t want to rely on it in case the school bans it or considers it cheating, she said.
Other students aren’t shy, sharing on forums like Reddit that they’ve submitted assignments written and solved by ChatGPT — and sometimes they do the same for other students. On TikTok, the hashtag #chatgpt has over 578 million views, with people sharing videos about the tool writing paper and solve coding problem.
One videotapes shows a student copying a multiple choice test and pasting it into the tool with the caption: “I don’t know about you guys but I just had Chat GPT in my finals. Good luck with your studies.”
